This Month in Queer Religious History*

August: Looking Back on A Year of Celebrating Queer Religious History

This month concludes a full year of This Month in Queer Religious History. Written by Bernie Schlager, PhD, Executive Director of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS), this series has run from September 2025 through August 2026 in honor of the Center’s 25th anniversary.

Over the past eleven months, we have explored a variety of topics, including a fifteenth-century French peasant girl, a twentieth-century Zen monk, a march on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and a New Year’s Ball in San Francisco.

Founders and Institution-Builders

Two installments have told the stories of communities built by and for queer people of faith. In September, we marked the founding of DignityUSA in 1969 by an Augustinian priest in San Diego, California. He quietly began laying the groundwork for what would become one of the most enduring organizations for LGBTQ+ Catholics.

In February, we honored the history of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, founded on 9 February 1973 when a small group of LGBTQ+ Jews gathered in a Manhattan living room for what would become the world’s first LGBTQ+-founded synagogue.

Sacred Spaces of Joy and Refuge

In January, we celebrated the story of the 1965 New Year’s Benefit Ball in San Francisco, held on 1 January 1965 to raise funds for queer and trans people facing homelessness and discrimination. Organized with support from José Sarria and religious allies including Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Methodist Church and the newly founded Council on Religion and the Homosexual, the Ball stands as an early example of faith communities working together to support queer people.

Days and Movements of Public Witness

Three installments marked moments when queer people claimed public and religious space together.

  • In October, we honored National Coming Out Day, rooted in the activism of the late 1980s and observed every year on 11 October as a reminder of the importance of visibility and authenticity.
  • In December, we recalled World AIDS Day, first observed on 1 December 1988, a day that has become for many a sacred anniversary of solidarity and remembrance.
  • And in April, we looked back at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Equal Rights and Liberation, when approximately one million people gathered in the nation’s capital for one of the largest civil rights demonstrations in US history.

A Statement of Faith

In June, we told the story of the 1972 Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality, drafted when more than one hundred Quakers gathered for an impromptu workshop at Ithaca College during the Friends General Conference. This statement is an early document of support for members of the Society of Friends with a bisexual identity.

Lives of Sanctity and Struggle

Four installments have honored LGBTQ+ individuals who were leaders within their own religious traditions.

  • In November, we celebrated the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, who became the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest on 8 January 1977, marking the culmination of a life spent navigating the boundaries of race, gender, and law.
  • In March, we remembered Issan Dorsey, a former drag queen and US Navy veteran who became a Sōtō Zen monk and teacher.
  • In May, we honored Saint Joan of Arc, the nineteen-year-old peasant girl burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431. Joan was condemned as a heretic by a church court acting in the interests of England.
  • And in July, we told the story of Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman and Stonewall Uprising veteran whose body was recovered from the Hudson River on 6 July 1992, and whose fierce, syncretic spirituality has too often been left out of the story of her activism.

Why This Retrospective Matters

Read together, these eleven months tell a story larger than any single figure or particular historical event. These individuals and movements remind us that queer religious history is wonderfully varied: it runs through Buddhist monasteries and Quaker meetinghouses, medieval trials and Stonewall-era safe houses, a Manhattan living room and the US National Mall.

This series has included people ordained by their churches and people condemned by them, sometimes both in the same lifetime. And, month after month, we have been reminded that the sacred and the queer belong together.

We are grateful to everyone who has read, shared, and responded to these stories over the past year. The archive of past installments remains available on our CLGS website for anyone who wants to revisit a story or share it with their congregation, classroom, or family.

Bernard Schlager, PhD | Executive Director of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS)

SOURCES

This Month in Queer Religious History

*Each month during 2025-2026, our 25th anniversary year, CLGS is honoring an individual, event, or movement of consequence in queer religious history. Although we will be able to highlight only a very few of those individuals and movements that have contributed to the thriving of LGBTQ+ persons and communities throughout history, we are eager to share with you the stories of some of the people and movements that have created positive change for LGBTQ+ people, our families, and our communities.